1 Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to mobile communications. More particularly, the present invention relates to a mobile communication apparatus with an antenna array and a mobile communication method therefor, which is able to minimize the effects of fading, interference, and noise.
2. Description of the Related Art
Next-generation mobile communication systems require high-speed data transmission, faster than the mobile communication systems for personal communication service. As a wireless communication standard, Europe and Japan have adopted the wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) scheme, and North America has adopted the CDMA-2000 scheme.
A mobile communication system is commonly constructed of a base station and a plurality of mobile stations communicating with each other via the base station. High-speed data transmission in a mobile communication system can be achieved by minimizing user co-interference and signal loss, such as fading, affected by channel characteristics. Diversity techniques have been applied to prevent unstable communications due to fading. One such technique, a space diversity technique, uses multiple antennas.
Use of multiple antennas is considered necessary for future mobile communication systems as it can minimize user co-interference. A transmission multiple antenna system used to increase the capacity of a transmitter, which employs a diversity technique using multiple antennas to counteract signal fading, requires a wide bandwidth for transmission due to a feature of next generation mobile communications.
For high-speed data transmission, it is essential to solve the problem of signal fading, which is the most significant channel characteristic affecting the performance of common mobile communication systems. This is because fading may reduce the amplitude of a received signal to tens of dB or even a few dB. Many kinds of diversity techniques are applied to overcome fading. A common CDMA technique utilizes a Rake receiver, which receives multiple path signals using the delay spread of a channel and corresponds to a reception diversity technique. However, this reception diversity technique is not effective when the delay spread is small.
Doppler spread channels require a time diversity technique using interleaving and coding techniques. However, the time diversity technique cannot be applied to a low-speed Doppler channel. An interior channel with a small delay spread and a pedestrian channel, which is a typical example of a low-speed Doppler channel, require a space diversity technique to counteract fading. The space diversity technique uses two or more antennas to overcome signal attenuation due to fading during transmission by switching antennas. Space diversity is classified into reception antenna diversity requiring reception antennas and transmission antenna diversity requiring transmission antennas. It is impractical in terms of cost and space utilization to adopt reception antenna diversity at individual mobile stations; instead, transmission antenna diversity is adopted at the base station.
Transmission antenna diversity is categorized into closed-loop transmission diversity where mobile stations feed downlink channel information back to the base station and open-loop transmission diversity where no feedback occurs from mobile stations to the base station. According to a transmission diversity approach, a mobile station determines the phase and magnitude on each channel to find optimal weight values. For this determination of the phase and amplitude on the channel, the base station transmits a pilot signal through each antenna to the mobile station. Then, the mobile station determines the magnitude and phase on the channel from each pilot signal and finds optimal weight values based on the magnitude and phase on the channel.
In transmission antenna diversity, diversity effects and signal-to-noise ratio improve as the number of antennas increases. However, the improvement of diversity efficiency decreases as the number of antennas (or signal transmission paths) used at the base station, i.e., the degree of diversity, increases. Therefore, continuing to increase the number of antennas beyond a certain point merely to achieve an extremely high diversity effect would be costly and impractical, i.e., the law of diminishing returns comes into effect. However, increasing the number of antennas used in the base station to minimize the power of interference signals and to maximize the internal signal-to-noise ratio is an effective and quite practical technique.
A transmission adaptive antenna array system that provides diversity effects as well as beamforming effects to protect an internal signal from interference and noise is called a “downlink beamforming system.” Particularly, a system that utilizes feedback information as in transmission diversity is called a “closed loop downlink beamforming system.” Closed downlink beamforming systems that use information fed back from mobile stations to the base station require a sufficiently wide feedback channel bandwidth. If the feedback channel bandwidth is not sufficiently wide, communication performance degrades due to poor adaptability to channel information variations.
The European IMT-2000 standardization association has adopted transmission antenna array (TXAA) modes 1 and 2, which are closed loop transmission diversity schemes for two antennas, in the 3 GPP (Generation Partnership Project) R (Release) 99 version. TxAA mode 1, suggested by Nokia, feeds back only a phase variation between two antennas, whereas TxAA mode 2, suggested by Motorola, feeds back the gains as well as phases of two antennas. TxAA modes 1 and 2 are disclosed in the specification for the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) by the 3 GPP.
TxAA mode 1 or 2 for closed loop transmission diversity uses an adaptive antenna array and applies different complex number weights to each antenna of the adaptive transmission antenna array. The weights applied to the adaptive antenna array are associated with transmission channels and thus are expressed as, for example, w=h*. Here, w is a transmission antenna array weight vector and h is a transmission array channel vector. Hereinafter, bold symbols indicate vectors and non-bold symbols indicate scalars.
In general, in a mobile communications system using a frequency division duplex (FDD) technique, transmission and reception channels have different characteristics, so there is need to feed back transmission channel information to identify the characteristic of a transmission channel h by the base station. According to TxAA mode 1 or 2, a mobile station calculates weight information w to be obtained from the channel information h and feeds the calculated weigh information back to the base station.
TxAA mode 1 quantizes only the phase component of the weight information w, θ2−θ1, into two bits and feeds back the result of the quantization. The weight information w is expressed as w=[|w1|exp(jθ1), |w2|exp(jθ2)], where w1 and w2 are scalars. Here, the phase accuracy is B/2 and the maximum quantization error is B/4. A refined mode of updating only one of two bits at every time point is applied to increase feedback efficiency. As an example, possible combinations of two bits include {b(2k), b(2k−1)} and {b(2k), b(2k+1)}, where b indicates a bit fed back during every consecutive time slot.
TxAA mode 2 feeds back both the constituents, phase and gain, of the weight information. The phase of the weight information is fed back as 3 bits, and the gain of the weight information is fed back as 1 bit. Therefore, the phase accuracy is B/4 and the maximum quantization error is B/8. A progressive refined mode of updating only one of four bits at every time point is applied to increase feedback efficiency. This progressive refine mode provides no prescription, unlike the refine mode having the prescription that each bit should be an orthogonal basis value.
The above-described TxAA modes 1 and 2 have the following problems when the number of antennas and space-time channel characteristics vary.
First, when the number of antennas increases, the quantity of weights for each antenna that should be fed back also increases and thus communication performance may degrade depending on the migration speed of a mobile station. With increasing migration speed of a mobile station, space-time channel variations become serious on a common fading channel. In this case, the feedback speed of channel information should be increased. For this reason, if the feedback speed of channel information is limited, communication performance may degrade due to an increase in the amount of feedback information with an increase in the number of antennas.
Second, when antennas are not spaced sufficiently far apart, the correlation between channels for each antenna increases. This increased channel-to-channel correlation reduces the quantity of information carried in a channel matrix. Use of an effective feedback scheme can prevent communication performance degradation occurring with a mobile station migrating at a rapid speed, even with the increasing number of antennas. However, because TxAA modes 1 and 2 are defined under the assumption that two space-time channels for each antenna are independent, efficiency is not ensured when the number of antennas and space-time channel characteristics vary. In addition, TxAA modes 1 and 2 have not been applied for circumferences using more than two antennas.